Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently
-
Hi,
we are a South African insurance company.
We have a page http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle which has a 301 redirect to http://www.miway.co.za/car-insurance.
Problem is that the former page is ranking in the index rather than the latter. The latter page does index occasionally in the same position, but rarely.
This is primarily for search phrases like "car insurance" and "car insurance quotes".
The ranking was knocked down the index with Penquin 2.0. It was not ranking at all but we have managed to recover to 12/13. This abnormally has only been occurring since the recovery.
The correct page does index for other search terms like "insurance for car".
Your help would be appreciated, thanks!
-
It would seem that http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle is actually doing a 302 (Temporary) redirect... which means its not passing any link equity. This could be the reason it is still showing in the index instead of your intended page. You would need to implement a 301 (Permanent) redirect to completely remove the old page in favor of the new one.
Edit: I double-checked it with a few more user-agents in SEOBook's HTTP Status Codes Checker and actually seem to be getting 301s sometimes and 302s other times. Not sure why it would be doing that but I would still double check that you have your redirects implemented correctly as that could be the culprit.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
Page must be internally linked to get indexed?
If a there is page like website.com/page; I think this page will be indexed by Google even we don't link it internally from anywhere. Is this true? Will it makes any difference in-terms of "indexability" if we list this page on sitemap? I know page's visibility will increase when link from multiple internal pages. I wonder will there be any noticeable difference while this page is listed in sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Google is indexing the wrong pages
I have been having problems with Google indexing my website since mid May. I haven't made any changes to my website which is wordpress. I have a page with the title 'Peterborough Cathedral wedding', I search Google for 'wedding Peteborough Cathedral', this is not a competitive search phrase and I'd expect to find my blog post on page one. Instead, half way down page 4 I find Google has indexed www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/blog with the title 'wedding photojournalist | Portfolio', what google has indexed is a link to the blog post and not the blog post itself. I repeated this for several other blog posts and keywords and found similar results, most of which don't make any sense at all - A search for 'Menorca wedding photography' used to bring up one of my posts at the top of page one. Now it brings up a post titled 'La Mare wedding photography Jersey" which happens to have a link to the Menorca post at the bottom of the page. A search for 'Broadoaks country house weddng photography' brings up 'weddingphotojournalist | portfolio' which has a link to the Broadoaks post. a search for 'Blake Hall wedding photography' does exactly the same. In this case Google is linking to www.weddingphotojournalist.blog again, this is a page of recent blog posts. Could this be a problem with my sitemap? Or the Yoast SEO plugin? or a problem with my wordpress theme? Or is Google just a bit confused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Index or not index Categories
We are using Yoast Seo plugin. On the main menu we have only categories which has consist of posts and one page. We have category with villas, category with villa hotels etc. Initially we set to index and include in the sitemap posts and excluded categories, but I guess it was not correct. Would be a better way to index and include categories in the sitemap and exclude the posts in order to avoid the duplicate? It somehow does not make sense for me, If the posts are excluded and the categories included, will not then be the categories empty for google? I guess I will get crazy of this. Somebody has perhaps more experiences with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
Why does Google add my domain as a suffix to page title in SERPS?
Hi, If I do a search in Google - for one our products on our site, our site comes up - but it would appear that google is adding our domain name as a suffix to our title in the results... Anyone else seen this? Can I do anything about it? I would prefer it not to appear. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Google Generating its Own Page Titles
Hi There I have a question regarding Google generating its own page titles for some of the pages on my website. I know that Google sometimes takes your H1 tag and uses it as a page title, however, can anyone tell me how I can stop this from happening? Is there a meta tag I can use, for example like the NOODP tag? Or do I have to change my page title? Thanks Sadie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape0 -
Does Google Index Videos onsite when using JQuery?
Hi, I'm showing my videos using jquery lightbox etc. This means that I do not have the normal YouTube "embedding" code onpage. Does anyone know if Google will somehow index my videos? Any solutions / ideas? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Will Google read my page title and H1?
Dim strTitle : strTitle = "The Title Of My Page" <title>Company name - <%=strTitle%></title> <%=strTitle%> Will Google be able to read this? When I view source the relevant information is in the tags but I'm wondering if Google hates this or not? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0